The presentation tray. The Salt and Pepper bars I made are the unmarked squares on the left, but it’s the “Twix” bars in the middle which stole the show — they were amazing! I wish I had some of those right now, actually…

I thought it might be time for a little photo slideshow — especially since we just did another confections lab in Chocolates and Showpieces last week and ended up with trays of lovely chocolates.

In Intermediate Cakes, we played around with pastillage as a medium since we have to use several different pastes in our Wedding Cake design project, and we did a buttercream frosting tasting. Very interesting to have so many different buttercream styles side by side. When it comes to frosting, it is definitely different strokes for different folks.

Right now I am prepping for my final projects. Today is the first of a two day Wedding Cake design project, so I’ll get back to you about that. In the meantime, you can see my design draft in the slideshow, along with my design model for a different design project: my Sugar Centerpiece. Yes, I assemble models like a third grader. What can I say? The cutting and the pasting are not my thang.

This is the design draft for my Intermediate Cakes project. Theme: May Wedding.

Birds about to be etched in cocoa on pastillage.

Experimenting with pastillage shape for wedding cake topper.

A buttercream tasting — seven different recipes side by side to compare taste, texture, color, and pipe-ability.

This frame is for a Strawberry Balsamic Butter Ganache (that’s passionfruit on the left for a different confection).

These are macadamia nuts on dark chocolate discs piped with a milk chocolate and rum ganache. They are about to get their dark chocolate bath!

This is the caramel for the Salt and Pepper bar I was making in class — right before my thermometer went haywire and I scorched the caramel — couldn’t really tell, but STILL!

The presentation tray. The Salt and Pepper bars I made are the unmarked squares on the left, but it’s the “Twix” bars in the middle which stole the show — they were amazing! I wish I had some of those right now, actually…

This is the design model for my sugar centerpiece. I’m really hoping this model doesn’t do the final piece justice…